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Publisher’s Weekly (Starred Review)

McGuire’s “new history” shines fresh light upon the germinal role of black women in the birth and development of the civil rights movement. “For decades,” she writes, “the Montgomery bus boycott has been told as a story triggered by Rosa Parks’s spontaneous refusal to give up her seat followed by the triumphant leadership of men.” McGuire, assistant professor of history at Wayne State University, goes behind that story to tell of black women’s struggles against abuse by white bus drivers and police officers that launched the boycott. She foregrounds black women’s experiences of “verbal, physical, and sexual abuse” as prime movers of the grassroots movement. From the rape of Recy Taylor (1944) to the rape of Joan Little (1975), McGuire restores to memory the courageous black women who dared seek legal remedy, when black women and their families faced particular hazards for doing so. McGuire brings the reader through a dark time via a painful but somehow gratifying passage in this compelling, carefully documented work. (Sept.)

“At the Dark End of the Street is one of those rare studies that makes a well-known story seem startlingly new. Anyone who thinks he knows the history of the modern civil rights movement needs to read this this terrifying, illuminating book.”

– Kevin Boyle, National Book Award-winner for Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age

“This gripping story changes the history books, giving us a revised Rosa Parks and a new civil rights story. You can’t write a general U.S. history without altering crucial sentences because of McGuire’s work. Masterfully narrated, At the Dark End of the Street presents a deep civil rights movement with women at the center, a narrative as poignant, painful and complicated as our own lives.”

–Timothy B. Tyson, National Book Award Finalist for Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“Just when we thought there couldn’t possibly be anything left to uncover about the civil rights movement, Danielle McGuire finds a new facet of that endlessly prismatic struggle at the core of our national identity. By reinterpreting black liberation through the lens of organized resistance to white male sexual aggression against African-American women, McGuire ingeniously upends the white race’s ultimate rationale for its violent subjugation of blacks—imputed black male sexual aggression against white women. It is an original premise, and At the Dark End of the Street delivers on it with scholarly authority and narrative polish.”

“Following the lead of pioneers like Darlene Clark Hine, Danielle McGuire details the all too ignored tactic of rape of black women in the everyday practice of southern white supremacy. Just as important, she plots resistance against this outrage as an integral facet of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This book is as essential as its history is infuriating.”

--Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People

“A young scholar unearths some hidden history about women in the civil rights movement—then finds it unexpectedly echoed in her own life.” Download the complete PDF article.

“In this compelling book, Danielle L. McGuire excavates a tragic hidden legacy of slavery in the United States: the rape and sexual exploitation of thousands of black females (both women and girls) from the antebellum period to the present…” Review in California Lawyer Magazine by Margaret Russell